TechReport take a further look at the NVIDIA's GeForce 3D Vision, new stereoscopic technology being introduced by NVIDIA using wireless shutter glasses and NVIDIA accelerators. The package comes with two main components: a pair of glasses and a little, black, pyramid-shaped doohickey that happens to be an IR transmitter. Both of these devices plug into the computer via a USB cable. The glasses plug in only for the purpose of charging. Otherwise, they're wireless and won't keep you tethered to your PC, thank goodness. The IR transmitter must remain connected to the PC, of course, because it's what sends signals to the glasses.

With all of the qualifications, caveats, gotchas, and frustrations I've expressed over GeForce 3D Vision, you probably have a good sense already that this technology just isn't ready for prime time yet. Few games work well enough to make it worth buying, and from a purely value-oriented standpoint, the math is brutal. Not only do you have to buy the glasses for $199 and a display for $349 or more, but you'll also need quite a bit more GPU power in order to keep 3D Vision performance up to snuff. Then, whenever you're not playing games, you'll be stuck with a relatively low-resolution, low-quality monitor. For somewhere in the same basic price neighborhood, you could instead pick up a 27" or 30" LCD, with an IPS or VA panel and much better color reproduction, and get higher frame rates with a cheaper graphics card. That's easily a better deal than a 3D Vision setup, no question about it.

Yet I can't help but feel sympathetic to what Nvidia is doing here. When I first saw this technology working properly at its full potential, I was struck by the fact that the GPU is already doing the math necessary to create truly 3D virtual worlds. Yeah, sure, we all know that, I suppose. But seeing it in action, in the third dimension, really drives the point home. The fact that a GPU maker would want to foster the development of 3D display technology makes perfect sense. The visual computing ecosystem would benefit greatly if this sort of thing became universally available and broadly compatible with existing applications.